On Friday, February 22nd a long-awaited moment arrived: our yearly evaluation and planning meeting. In Bioleft we find it crucial to take some time to harvest past achievements and sow future transformations.
With this goal in mind, our team gathered in a one-day-long meeting at the campus of the National University of San Martín. Bioleft members travelled from Córdoba, Bahía Blanca and La Plata to reflect on the learnings of the last year, on the issues that needed to be improved and to celebrate what makes us proud:
The new networks we are weaving:
- A new extensionist on the team. Román del Valle joined Bioleft to accompany the corn and tomato participatory breeding experiments.
- We expanded the tomato network. Minka and Bioleft are evaluating different types of tomatoes to find out which ones fit best to the production conditions of family farmers in the peri-urban area of Buenos Aires province.
- We extended the corn network. Regional offices from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) at Marcos Juarez (Córdoba province) and Chacabuco (Buenos Aires province) and the “Agroecological farmers of Chacabuco” group embarked on this year’s corn season.
The new networks we are strengthening:
- In 2023, we participated in the first Global Open-Source Seed Initiative in-person meeting! From this meeting, several action lines arose. Among them, we highlight a new participatory breeding experiment involving MASIPAG (Filipinas), Seed Savers Network (Kenia), Semi Rurali (Italia) and Bioleft (Argentina), coordinated by Bernd Hornburg, from Germany.
- More than 20 farmers are participating in the Creole tomato participatory breeding project, sharing information throughout the country.
The meeting enabled us to plan the activities that will be carried out during this year:
- Digital platform: we are developing a digital seed platform to share seeds, create new networks and learn a lot!
- Podcast: we are about to release “Re-enchant the Seeds” our first podcast series.
- Participatory breeding guide: we are writing a guide about participatory practices and vegetal breeding destined for those initiatives that are looking to develop this type of project and experiments
- Experiments: ¡We are thrilled to continue expanding our evaluators’ networks!
If you are interested in joining any of our work areas please don’t hesitate to write, Bioleft is an open space and everyone is welcome.
We are happy to meet and strengthen our commitment to work towards building a more diverse and equal seed system. If you are interested in our work, write to us at info@bioleft.org.